The website has been moved to a new domain: bruteforcelab.com. The old international TLD has served me well during the last years, but it’s time to move to a proper .com one. SSL will be added soon! Edit: done!

In the field of computer security, honeypots are systems aimed at deceiving malicious users or software that launch attacks against the servers and network infrastructure of various organizations. They can be deployed as protection mechanisms for an organization’s real systems, or as research units to study and analyze the methods employed by human hackers or malware. In this workshop we will outline the operation of two research honeypots, by manual deployment and testing in real time. A honeypot system will undertake the role of a web trap for attackers who target the SSH service in order to gain illegal server access. Another one will undertake the role of a malware collector, usually deployed by malware analysts and anti-virus companies to gather and securely store malicious binary samples. We will also talk about post-capturing activities and further analysis techniques. As an example, we will see how to index all the captured information in a search engine like Elasticsearch and then utilize ElastAlert, an easy to use framework to setup meaningful alerting. Lastly, visualization tools will be presented for the aforementioned systems, plus a honeypot bundle Linux distribution that contains pre-configured versions of the above tools and much more related utilities, which can make the deployment of honeypots in small or large networks an easy task.